The Hamlyn All-Colour Dictionary [antikvár]

How to use this bookHow often do you use a dictionary? I'm sure that whenever you do you rarely feel it is worth while to study it for more than a few minutes. You probably use one simply to find the meaning of a word, or to help solve a crossword puzzle. This is a great pity, because words are fascinating things and are very important in our lives; we use them to let people know what we are thinking, and to show what we are feeling.This dictionary has therefore been written with more than one idea in mind. The most important of course is to give the meanings of words. This book contains well over 5,000 main words, or headwords as they are called, with their meanings. Some of the words such as act, bear, go, cross, frame and so on, have so many meanings that they could only all be given in a very large book of many volumes, but this dictionary gives those most often met with, and they are numbered i, 2, 3, 4 . . .Words, like different parts of machines, are made to work for us, and the second use of a dictionary is to show how they can be put to work as moving parts of the machine called language. The simplest way of doing this is to put them into sentences which show how they are used. Some of the sentences in this book I have made up myself; some are quotations from great writers, especially from Shakespeare, who was the greatest sentence-constructor of all time. In all of them the words are working hard, describing things you see, things that are done, events of everyday life, giving scraps of information you may not have known before.In these pages the headword is printed in bold type and it is followed by the same word in brackets, divided into parts or syllables. Sometimes two words may look alike, whereas in fact they are not pronounced in the same way at all, and have different meanings. In such cases stress marks are shown to help you; for example, conduct (con-duct) and conduct (con-duct) are two separate words with two separate meanings. Instructions are also given as to how to pronounce certain words, where there might be doubt as to how to do so. When the word is used as part of a sentence to show its meaning, it is printed in italics. Look, for instance, at the first word in the book, abandon, and see how this is done.